The Graham Foundation is honored to announce the 2023 Carter Manny Awards for doctoral dissertations and research by emerging scholars. Through this annual program the Graham supports work that contributes to new narratives in contemporary understanding of architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.

The winner of the 2023 Carter Manny Writing Award is Aaron Tobey and the winner of the 2023 Carter Manny Research Award is Jia Weng. Both are history and theory of architecture doctoral candidates at Yale University School of Architecture. These projects, along with eight citations of special recognition, were selected by an external panel of scholars.

Tobey’s dissertation, “Drawing Management: Corporate Organization, International Practice, and the Making of Computer Aided Design,” details how computer aided design software and practices common today were coconstructed with transformations in the internal organization and international geography of architectural production at several large American architectural firms around information management and the design of design processes from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s.

Weng’s dissertation, “Environmental Conduits in China: Pipe Politics, Fluid Management, and the Rise of the Global Airscape,” investigates the evolution of heating and cooling conduits in China through three episodes in the twentieth century and examines how information-controlled material flows gave rise to a global airscape that generated thermal inequalities between kinetic elites and migrant workers through architecture.

The Carter Manny Award program—named for architect Carter H. Manny (1918–2017) in recognition of his contributions to the Graham Foundation, as founding trustee in 1956, director from 1971–93, and as director emeritus—has granted 45 awards and 139 citations representing over $1 million in support of this important student work since its establishment in 1996.

The 2023 Carter Many Awards panel included: Eva Díaz (Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History, Pratt); Ginger Nolan (Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, University of Southern California); and Adedoyin Teriba (Assistant Professor of Art History, Dartmouth).

Below is the full list of the 2023 Carter Manny Award winners and citations of special recognition. Learn more about the history of the award and browse a selection of past winners on the Foundation’s website.

2023 CARTER MANNY WRITING AWARD

Aaron Tobey

Drawing Management: Corporate Organization, International Practice, and the Making of Computer Aided Design
Yale University, School of Architecture

2023 CARTER MANNY RESEARCH AWARD



Jia Weng
Environmental Conduits in China: Pipe Politics, Fluid Management, and the Rise of the Global Airscape
Yale University, School of Architecture

2023 CARTER MANNY WRITING AWARD CITATIONS OF SPECIAL RECOGNITION

An Tairan
The Incidental Artifactuality of the Observational Sciences in Italy, c. 1840–1880
Princeton University, School of Architecture
This project investigates the erratic media byproducts and unintended artifactual consequences both triggered and revealed by a group of research institutions established for the scientific observation of nature in mid-to-late nineteenth-century Italy.

Deepthi Bathala
Famine crops, Plantations, and Environmental Imaginaries: Botanical gardens in colonial and contemporary India
University of Michigan, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
The genealogy of the earliest colonial botanical gardens in India illustrates a contingent colonial project of improvement, that of constructing regional climate imaginaries corresponding to ephemeral agricultural landscapes, contested, mediated and negotiated by human and non-human actors.

Michael Moynihan
Aggregative Expertise: A Global History of Housing, Information Science, and the Deprofessionalization of the Architect, 1973–82
Cornell University, Department of Architecture
This dissertation focuses on three projects funded by national governments (Mexico, Argentina, and Spain) to demonstrate that in the 1970s, expertise related to housing shifted from professional architects to aggregate experts working in entrepreneurial/consultancy groups, governmental research institutions, and international development aid agencies.

Chelsea Spencer
The Contract, the Contractor, and the Capitalization of American Building, 1870–1930
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture + Planning
At once a media history of the construction industry and a shadow history of modern architecture, this dissertation traces the rise of general contracting in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Sylvia Wu
Mosques on the Edge: Tale and Survival of Muslim Monuments in Coastal China
University of Chicago, Department of Art History
The dissertation is a close study of the Qingjing Mosque complex in Quanzhou, China, whose medieval and contemporary sections have distinct histories but are made to conform to a coherent historical narrative that subsequently allows the site's newly constructed architectural profile to eclipse that of its premodern past.

2022 CARTER MANNY RESEARCH AWARD CITATIONS OF SPECIAL RECOGNITION

Angelika Joseph
Red Power Takeover: Native American Activists, Colonial Landscapes, and the Design of Sovereignty
Princeton University, Humanities Council and School of Architecture
This dissertation examines the strategies by which Red Power Movement activists designed social, cultural, and political transformations, weaponizing landscapes shaped by their oppressors against the state and creating new worlds within old architectural forms.

Adam Longenbach
Stagecraft / Warcraft: The Rise of the Military Mock Village in the American West, 1942–1953
Harvard University, Graduate School of Design
This dissertation investigates the mid-twentieth century rise of the military "mock village," experimental sites where novel ways of seeing and constructing architecture coincided with the production of new forms of violence and destruction.

Qiran Shang
“It’s Only Dancing…”: Urban Spaces, Pleasure, and Resistance in Berlin, San Francisco, and Shanghai, 1924–1989
University of Pennsylvania, Weitzman School of Design
Analyzing how people have historically made spaces of popular dance into sites of resistance, this dissertation illuminates gay and lesbian dance venues in 1920s Berlin, countercultural landscapes of dance in 1960s San Francisco, and students’ spontaneous dance parties and queer ballrooms in 1980s Shanghai by studying rare films and photographs, memoirs, oral testimonies, as well as maps and building plans.

UPCOMING GRANT DEADLINES
2024 Grants to Individuals: application due September 15, 2023
2024 Carter Manny Award: application available September 15; due November 15, 2023
2024 Grants to Organizations: application available January 15, 2024; due February 25, 2024

Images: [1] Screen photograph of the interface of DRAW3D displaying a three-dimensional wireframe model of Chicago's "loop" district compiled using several other graphic and non-graphic programs created at SOM for DEC mainframe computers and Tektronix Graphics Terminals by the beginning of the 1980s, 1980, Chicago. Courtesy SOM / Copyright SOM
[2] Thomas T. K. Zung and Shoji Sadao, China International Trade Center, Tianjin or Beijing, China, 1986–89. From Thomas T. K. Zung, ed., "Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for the Millennium," (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014). Courtesy Thomas T. K. Zung